


Kin

by greygerbil



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Day 6, M/M, yuuri prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 00:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13581729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: With the wedding date approaching fast, Yuuri and Victor talk about their families, past, present, and future.





	Kin

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Victuuri Week 2018. The Prompt is "Family".

“Is it really alright that we’ll celebrate our wedding here? That’s a lot of work for your family.”

“My parents would be insulted if we did it anywhere else,” Yuuri said, leaning back in the onsen with a lopsided smile. “Mari says we’re allowed to go to another hotel for the wedding night, though.”

“That’s good, it might get loud.” Victor winked, looking at Yuuri with a shark’s smile. 

Because he didn’t want to do anything in this hot spring that his parents would be ashamed to know about, Yuuri forewent and answer in favour of quickly searching his brain for another topic, vaguely marriage-related so it wouldn’t seem like a total non-sequitur.

“My mother wanted to look up a few Russian recipes for the wedding. You’ll have to tell her what you want to eat.”

“How nice of her. I’m looking forward to it,” Victor answered.

“Did you decide who you wanted to invite?” Yuuri added.

He looked up from the steaming water of the hot spring at Victor, who strutted shameless as ever across the path towards the onsen, his towel dangling from his hand with his body naked on display for Yuuri.

“Yes,” he said as he tried the water by dipping his foot in, then slid down, shivering pleasurably, and dropped the towel on the bank. “Although Christophe was already on your list – and Yuri, too. That surprised me. He hasn’t stopped calling you pig yet…”

Victor laughed and Yuuri shrugged, scratching his cheek.

“He did spend time with us here, right? Yuuko wants to see him again and my parents got used to him, too… besides, I think he’s mostly just being sixteen.”

“Tell Yuuko to text him so he has an excuse to come. I bet he wants to, but he sure won’t be able to admit it,” Victor said, sliding deeper into the water.

“That’s just two people, though. Isn’t there anyone else?”

“Yakov, of course,” Victor said, leaning against the stones next to Yuuri, “and Lilia Baranovskaya. I wonder if they’ll come together. Just for convenience’s sake, or so they’ll say.” He chuckled. “These two and Georgi. That’s it from my side.”

“Ah… I guess it’s a smaller wedding, then,” Yuuri said, slowly.

“If we can keep the paparazzi out,” Victor reminded him.

Shaking his head, Yuuri ran his wet fingers through his hair.

“It’s still crazy to me that this is something I have to worry about for my wedding,” he muttered.

“Well, now that you won the Grand Prix they’ll definitely come for both of us, so it’s just not my fault.”

Yuuri was convinced that the most interesting thing about him in the eyes of everyone who wasn’t a die-hard figure skating fan was still the fact that he had been the man to make Victor Nikiforov stay, but he knew Victor would argue with him about it, so he didn’t say that. Instead, he enjoyed the way Victor settled against his shoulder in the onsen. There was a nagging thought still at the back of his mind, but just when he was about to open his mouth, Victor began talking of going to a nearby Shinto shrine tomorrow and Yuuri quieted down, not wanting to bring up something that, by all indications, was certain to ruin the mood.

-

Later that evening, when he had written down the list of guests and Victor sat on the ground looking distractedly happy while playing with Makkachin, Yuuri finally found the courage to ask.

“Victor?” he began.

Victor raised the hand with Makkachin’s treat, holding it just out of the reach of his dog.

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you invite anyone from your family?” Yuuri asked, very carefully.

The implied follow-up question was, perhaps, why he had never introduced Yuuri to anyone in his family or really ever mentioned them with so much of a word. He’d thought about this before, especially seeing Victor around his own parents and sister, but figured there probably was a good reason he didn’t know and poking at it would bring up something painful that he didn’t want to make Victor talk about if Victor didn’t feel that he wanted to. Still, after all their time together, it seemed like something he should know.

“Oh, I don’t have any family,” Victor said easily, turning away to hold the treat above Makkachin’s head again.

“You’re an orphan?” Yuuri asked, surprised.

“No. Yes? I mean, I am now. I don’t know if my father is dead, though. He ran off when I wasn’t even born yet.” Victor dropped the treat for Makkachin and pulled himself up onto Yuuri’s bed, looking over at him in contemplative silence for a moment before he continued. “My mother died when I was thirteen, but I was already a gold medal winner by that point and the Figure Skating Federation was interested in me, so I got lucky. Yakov pulled a few strings and I didn’t have to go to an orphanage. I had a little room above Lilia’s studio for a while before I got my own apartment.”

“And there’s no one else?”

“My mother’s family were hard-line Russian-orthodox, from how she told it, and they wanted nothing to do with her illegitimate bastard son,” Victor said, smiling. “Or her for that matter. She wasn’t the kind to bow to anyone’s rules.”

The thread of real longing in Victor’s voice as he talked of her stirred both pity and affection in Yuuri. It was not often that Victor let his vulnerabilities show, even in front of him.

“What was she like?” he asked.

His fiancé leaned back against the wall and pondered the question.

“Not the kind of person you can describe in a few words, really,” Victor said. “I remember when I was five or six, she woke me up and said ‘this city is boring, let’s go’ and she pulled on my coat and boots over my pyjama and put me on the back of her motorcycle. We moved from Archangelsk to St. Petersburg that night. I think she’d broken up with one of her boyfriends…” He chuckled. “She couldn’t cook, so all we ever had in the kitchen was canned food and soda and vodka. I think it was also so we could throw it into bags easier when we inevitably moved. We lived in all these old khrushchyovkas, probably ten of them before I turned eight, all over the country. She stopped skipping town when Yakov told her I had potential to become a competitive figure skater, though.”

“She does sound really – different,” Yuuri said. He’d spent all his childhood in this place, knew the house and the town like the back of his hand. It was hard to imagine the kind of life Victor had led as a young child.

“She was. I remember when I was little I used to sleep in the back rooms of the bars she worked at. When I was old enough to stay at home on my own at night, she got me Makkachin so I wouldn’t be lonely. Skating is an expensive hobby and we couldn’t really afford it, but she didn’t want me to stop because of that.” Victor glanced out of the window. “When I won my first competitions, I was mainly after the price money, to be honest. She never complained, though, she was proud of me. When I grew older, it became easier because I was already getting sponsorship deals. She talked about us going on a road trip to the U.S. in the off-season in a few years when she’d saved up enough money.” He tilted his head. “Then she rode her motorcycle one night and got pushed off the road by a truck.”

The end to the weird little tale came so abruptly that Yuuri felt his stomach tighten. Victor had warned him she’d died early.

“I’m so sorry.”

“So am I,” Victor said with a nod.

Yuuri regarded him quietly for a moment.

“You make it sound like you got along… why don’t you ever talk about her?”

Victor paused once more, waving his hand at Makkachin again to lure him closer and scratch him behind the ears.

“A few months after her death I won another gold medal and a Russian gossip rag found a few old acquaintances of us. They made her out to be a bad mother and wrote all this drivel about what a poor child I was for having lived the way I did. I didn’t really know how to stand up to journalists back then and Yakov told me the more I said, the more I’d fuel the fire, so I just refused to comment to the media about my family ever again. I think just telling it like I remember her makes her sound a bit weird, too, and... I guess she was. I don’t want people to think she was a bad mother, though, so I don’t talk about her much at all. She wasn’t perfect, but she really liked me and she really tried. A lot of people don’t get that much from their parents.”

Slowly, Yuuri nodded his head. He got up from the chair to sit next to Victor on the bed, unsure what to do, but determined to comfort him in some way. However, Victor smiled at him and touched his arm.

“It’s fine, Yuuri. I’d love it if she were around, but she died a long time ago, so...”

“Thank you for telling me about her. Still, it’s sad you won’t have any family coming to your wedding,” Yuuri murmured.

“You know… Yakov and Lilia have been teaching me for ages and Georgi’s been my rink mate for twenty years. They’re all a bit odd in their own ways, but – it’s not like I was really all alone. And now I’m definitely not.”

Victor leaned over to press a kiss on Yuuri’s cheek.

-

“Yuuri, do you want children?”

Yuuri did his best not to spit a mouthful of ramen over his trousers. Victor had this talent for asking the most weighed questions at absolutely random times.

“Children?” he mumbled, after he’d managed to swallow.

“Yes. We could adopt some. Not now, I mean, but when we’ve retired from competing.”

Yuuri paused, placing his chopsticks down. Did he want children? He’d always kind of seen it as a given that he’d have some, maybe because he’d grown up in such a traditional family and his childhood had been really nice. Of course, he was pretty sure he’d go into a panic if someone handed him a real-life baby to take care of right now, but the idea had always been there.

“I guess so,” he said slowly. “What about you?”

“I didn’t used to think I’d make a good father, but now... my approach to life has changed a bit. Besides, as long as you’re also around, the child has a chance to turn out normal.”

“I think you’ll make a great father,” Yuuri said, more heartfelt than he’d planned because Victor had probably just been joking.

Victor smiled at him. “I think we’d make a great family,” he amended.


End file.
